Overview

The Texas Veterans Commission (TVC) is the State of Texas agency responsible for providing services to the state’s 1.7 million veterans and their families. TVC assists veteran families with disability claims, counseling, filing for VA compensation, employment and job seeker assistance, education benefits, and locating community services. The TVC employs more than 320 individuals located in 110 offices throughout Texas. Leading the nation with veteran’s benefit assistance, the TVC helped recover more than $1.8 billion in payments to veterans.

Challenge

For years the TVC used a manual process and checklist to follow veteran claims throughout the VA process. Due to the large amount of cases processed and TVC’s reliance on paper documents, they could not track case specifics without a cumbersome filing system. With offices separated geographically, there seemed to be a disconnect exchanging veteran case information due to inconsistent claim filing procedures and processes. Due to the increasing number of cases, compounded by an inefficient unprogressive manual process, TVC was at the point of turning veterans away if they did not improve their process.

Solution 

Selected by the TVC, McLane Advanced Technologies (MAT) created an electronic case management solution to assist staff in efficiently and accurately managing veteran claims. This solution created a secure web-based application that gave personnel the ability to upload veteran demographical data and auto-populate compensation and disability forms via an internet connection. The single database also allowed employees to update veteran records and previously filed claims if needed. Additionally, TVC asked MAT to expand the capabilities of this application by adding an electronic version of TVC’s employment development plan. The expanded system allows the TVC to maintain data integrity with a single database, capture additional veteran data pertinent to employment, maintain an interview log, and offer reporting capabilities.

Results

With the implementation of an electronic case management solution, the TVC streamlined their operations. A single integrated database allowed all TVC offices access to all veteran demographic details and increased data integrity. With its easy to use intuitive interface, training was minimal. Most importantly with a web-based case management system in place, the TVC is faster and more efficiently able to serve veterans with their disability claims, counseling, and employment services.